'After your quarrel with Ellinor——'
'Don't call it a quarrel, Mary—say coldness. Well?'
'It is very kind of you to take the trouble to come here now.'
'Kind—trouble; why, what has come to you, Mary, that you speak thus, and to me? A farewell letter might have done, but I—I preferred to come to the old place once again.'
'Pardon me, Robert, but I am so crushed—so confused—that I scarcely know what I say.'
'But is the step you are about to take absolutely necessary, and in such hot haste too?'
'What step?' asked Mary, as if to delay the bitterness of the admission.
'Leaving Birkwoodbrae! I can't make out the mystery of it at all!'
'Alas! we must go; this house was never ours—we dwelt here on sufferance; and the place is another's now—another whom we know only by name and in family feud.'
'Can it be that God's world belongs only to rascals!' exclaimed young Wodrow, bitterly.